Installing Office 365 Home Premium

Installing Office

Step 1: Clicking ‘Continue’ after purchase brings you to the Office.com/MyAccount page. and here's where you kick-start the installation process. You can activate your Skype world minutes, manage payment information, or cancel your subscription from here as well.

On the left, you can see that none of the allowed five installs for Office 365 Home Premium is used yet. On the right, there’s a drop-down that lets you select between Office for Windows and Office for Mac. There’s no way to just install a single Office app.

You can click on the 'Install' button now to begin the installation, but we suggest not to yet, until you've considered the following two points. These will touch on options available in the "Language and install options" link below the the green installation button.

Step 2: The first is language. Make sure the language that you want is selected. Office for Windows supports 28 languages; Office for Mac supports 14. If you're using Windows and your desired language isn't listed, you may have to download and install an Office Language Interface Pack (LIP).

Next, click on the "Additional install options" link at the bottom.

Step 3: This page gives you the extra option to select whether to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Office for Windows (Office for Mac 2011 is 32-bit only). By default, Office will install the 32-bit version to ensure maximum compatibility with third-party add-ins and other 32-bit version of Office programs. Even if you're running a 64-bit edition of Windows, Office will still default to the 32-bit version. The only exception when Office will install the 64-bit version automatically is when it detects that you're already running both a 64-bit edition of Windows and a 64-bit version of Office.

To learn more about the differences between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office, check out the Office support article here.

After making your selections, go ahead and click 'Install'.

Step 4: A setup executable needs to run before installation can proceed; just hit 'Run' when you see the request.

Step 6: All you need to do now is to wait. Basically, Click-to-Run downloads Office to your PC using a streaming method. Like how you can playback a video on YouTube before the whole file is buffered, Click-to-Run lets you start using Office before it's fully downloaded. The few images below illustrate how this works.

Just five minutes in, we were surprised to see Office 2013 app tiles on our Windows 8 Start screen.

We tried running Word 2013, but it was still being streamed to the PC.

A few minutes later, the welcome screen in Word appeared, but it's obvious that it was still being downloaded, as several elements were still missing.

As time passed, we could actually see the app taking shape. In this case, Word had synced with my document history and templates had appeared.

When you see this, you're gold.

Installing Office on Another Computer

Now when you return to your account page over at Office.com, you'll see how many installs were done, and on which machines. To install Office on another computer, you've to go to that computer, fire up the browser, sign in to Office.com/MyAccount, and follow the steps as detailed above. Don't worry though, the other user can sign in to his or her own Microsoft account later when the installation is completed.

If you've used up all the installs, you can deactivate Office from a computer to free up an install. This then allows you to install Office on a new computer. When you deactivate a computer, Office isn't removed from it. To remove Office, you can follow the instructions here. In a nutshell, you can do it via an automated Microsoft Fix it solution, through Windows' Control Panel, or manually. Deactivating Office will leave the apps on the computer in read-only mode.

Because Office isn't uninstalled from the computer when you deactivate it, you can easily reactivate it later without having to download it all over again. However, reactivation isn't done on the My Account page; rather, it's done on the client side (i.e. the system which has the Office installation deactivated). The easiest way is to launch an Office app, and click on the 'Reactivate' button that resides in a red bar near the top.

So there you’ve it. The process of subscribing Office 365 and installing the Office suite is for the most part a fuss-free affair thanks to the online store. While downloading software as huge as Office is bound to take some time, thanks to Click-to-Run, the wait is so much more bearable as you get to use an Office app before it’s fully downloaded and installed on your computer.

As we mentioned before, you can also get Office 365 Home Premium by buying a boxed copy of it from an authorized retailer. However, unlike the perpetually-licensed, boxed editions of Office 2013 suites, boxed copies of Office 365 subscriptions don't come with an installation DVD. Instead, you'll find a 25-character product key which you use during the initial setup process. Again, after signing in with your Microsoft account, you can install Office any time through Office.com/MyAccount. The product key is no longer needed at this stage.